Lead Designer: Mass Effect Andromeda Jetpacks are a game changer (But not too much)

Mass Effect: Andromeda obviously has a lot of new features, but this time, lead designer Ian S. Frazier tells GamesRader about how adding a jetpack to the game changed the game significantly, but not in a bad way, and that was very much on purpose.

Andromeda's movement animation was similar to Mass Effect 3, which wouldn't even allow you to jump at all. But Bioware's next game, Dragon Age: Inquisition added a jumping feature. Applying what they learned, the team thought about verticle movement in the Mass Effect series. Frazier explains their approach.

"We’re still a cover shooter, we’re not suddenly changing into a radically different game. We still want you to feel tactical, to think about what you’re doing. We want something that feels sci-fi appropriate, so jetpack. We want something that’ll let you get to a new tactical position in the battlefield. It’s not about hopping on someone’s head, it’s about getting up here and being able to have an advantage over this particular fight"

This ran into some problems, however. Old moves like the combat roll felt outdated by comparison. What they have now are similar to those old moves, but with the jetpack integrated.

"So we converted all those over to what you see now, so you have all these jet dodges and it built from there […] We added new functionality like hover jets, aiming while you’re in the air. Well, if we’ve got jump we should do something with it, so we have some moments in our progression so you can allow your hover to last longer or to be more accurate as you’re hovering, as you’ve seen in the combat skill tree. So you can be, ‘I’m all about jump, let me specialize in being good with jump,’ if you want to. And if you don’t, good, you don’t have to".

These new jetpack moves seem to add quite a bit more than just "Fly in and smash dudes" which is exciting for fans of cover-based tactical shooters.